Levees Not War

“He’s ahead in the polls, but he has a difficult challenge.
You think it’s easy for a black man to be elected president?”

In our last post we urged our readers to keep the pressure on Barack Obama about his commitment to ending the war. We don’t take that back, but we want everyone to read “Playing Down the Middle” by Bill Boyarsky, a former editor for the Los Angeles Times and a lecturer in journalism at USC. Like any Democratic candidate, no matter how special, Obama has to move to the center to win the White House. FDR’s liberal supporters were often disappointed by his playing the middle, but Roosevelt understood that “I cannot go any faster than the people will let me go,” as he once said to Upton Sinclair. And we’ve never met a Democrat who holds a grudge against FDR for having compromised when he had to. Read what Boyarsky has to say. Maybe, just maybe, Obama knows what he’s doing.

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Let next year’s 4th of July be a celebration of America’s independence from war and Iraqi Freedom from American occupation

We are confident that despite the media reports and rumors that Barack Obama is thinking of ‘refining’ his plan to end the war in Iraq, this does not mean he is retreating from his commitment. People are asking if Obama is backpedaling to the center, willing to relax his positions to win votes. (Arianna Huffington details “Seven Things Barack Obama Should Do to Keep from Blowing It” in a recent post on Huffington Post.) Incredibly, yet predictably, the McCain campaign claims that Obama is now coming around to McCain’s position on the war. Not bloody likely. The Republicans want to blur distinctions, but the candidates’ positions are starkly different. As Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo lucidly points out:

One candidate believes the US occupation is the solution; the other thinks it’s the problem. John McCain supports the permanent deployment of US troops in Iraq. That is why his hundred years remark isn’t some gotcha line. It’s a clear statement of his policy. Obama supports a deliberate and orderly withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. It’s a completely different view of America’s role in the world and future in the Middle East.

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